cv

Basics

Name Najwa Laabid
Label ML Engineer & PhD Researcher
Email najwa.laabid@aalto.fi
Url https://najwalaabid.github.io
Summary ML engineer and PhD researcher with 6+ years building end-to-end solutions across drug discovery, genomics, network security, and enterprise software. Experienced across the full stack from prototyping to deployment, with a consistent record of shipping pragmatic systems in both industry (Google, Ericsson) and research settings.

Work

  • 2022.05 - Present
    Doctoral Researcher
    Aalto University
    PhD research in machine learning applied to drug discovery, focusing on graph diffusion models for retrosynthesis.
    • Published at ICLR 2025 and ICML 2024 workshops
  • 2021.09 - 2022.04
    Junior Researcher
    University of Eastern Finland
    Built a VAE model for a NeurIPS 2022 competition tackling multimodal single-cell integration, a core open problem in computational biology with direct implications for cancer disease profiling.
    • PyTorch
    • AWS (EC2/S3)
  • 2021.06 - 2021.08
    ASCI Programme - Intern
    Aalto University
    Implemented approximate inference for nonstationary Gaussian processes via Kalman smoothing in JAX, enabling GP models to adapt to signals with time-varying dynamics such as gravitational wave chirps.
    • PyTorch
    • JAX
    • AWS (EC2/S3)
  • 2020.06 - 2021.05
    Thesis Placement - Data Analytics
    Ericsson Inc.
    Studied IoT botnet C&C communication across 14 malware families; built a Random Forest detection system across three traffic types, achieving near-perfect F1 on decentralized botnets and 0.85 F1 on real centralized captures.
    • Python3
    • AWS (EC2/S3)
  • 2019.07 - 2019.09
    Software Engineering Intern
    Google Inc.
    Built metadata parsing logic for Google's internal AV-preset automation, reducing manual meeting room setup for one of the world's largest internal conferencing tools.
    • JavaScript
    • HTML
    • CSS
  • 2019.01 - 2019.05
    Project Coordinator and Developer
    CLE at Al Akhawayn University
    Built a web platform replacing a manual booking system, handling session bookings and hour logging across 79+ courses and 2050 students; later led the redesign.
    • React
    • Node.js
    • HTML5
    • CSS
  • 2018.07 - 2018.12
    Software Engineering Intern
    Sankhya Jiva Tecnologia e Inovação LTDA
    Replaced Dialogflow with a custom open-source temporal expression parser for Brazilian Portuguese in enterprise chatbot BIA to improve language accuracy and eliminate vendor lock-in; adopted and extended by the team post-internship.
    • Java
    • JUnit
    • Kotlin
  • 2018.01 - 2018.06
    Full-Stack Developer
    ASC Brazil
    Developed a social media management module for an ERP platform, enabling clients to read and post across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter directly from within the system.
    • PHP/MySQL
    • NodeJS/MongoDB
    • HTML/CSS

Education

  • 2022.05 - Present

    Espoo, Finland

    Ph.D.
    Aalto University
    Machine learning applied to drug discovery
  • 2019.09 - 2021.07

    Joensuu, Finland

    M.Sc.
    University of Eastern Finland (UEF)
    Information Technology (focus on data science, minor in statistics)
  • 2015.09 - 2019.06

    Ifrane, Morocco

    B.Sc.
    Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane
    Computer Science (minor in business administration)

Awards

Publications

Skills

Machine Learning
PyTorch
JAX
TensorFlow
Scikit-Learn
Software Engineering
Python
Java
JavaScript
React
Node.js
Flask
Django
Infrastructure
AWS (EC2/S3)
OpenShift
Docker

Languages

Arabic
Native speaker
French
Professional proficiency
English
Professional proficiency
Portuguese
Intermediate
Finnish
Beginner

Interests

Machine Learning
Graph Diffusion Models
Drug Discovery
Retrosynthesis
Generative Models
Applications
Computational Chemistry
Genomics
Single-cell Analysis

Projects